Intel rejection of Ubuntu’s Mir patch forces Canonical to go own way

Open source driver for Intel graphics drops Mir support.

An Intel developer who oversees the company's open source graphics driver has pulled support for Mir, the display server that Canonical is building to replace the X window system.

Chris Wilson of Intel's Open Source Technology Center, steward of the xf86-video-intel open source graphics driver for Linux, wrote on Saturday that "We do not condone or support Canonical in the course of action they have chosen, and will not carry XMir patches upstream." He attributed this statement to "The Management," but did not say exactly who made the decision.

Intel is a supporter of Wayland, another display server that was rejected by Canonical when founder Mark Shuttleworth decided a new system was needed to power Ubuntu's Unity interface across mobile devices and PCs. Canonical developer Michael Hall criticized Wilson's move on Google+, saying, "There is no reason not to accept a patch to an Xorg video driver just because it supports a competitor to Wayland."

The code in question was "a patch to Intel's Xorg driver so that it can run Xorg sessions on top of a Mir system compositor," Hall wrote. "[I]t's fine if people think that Wayland is the 'right way' forward, but the submitted patches didn't hinder Wayland, nor does rejecting them help Wayland."

We e-mailed Wilson to ask for elaboration on the decision, and we also contacted Canonical to see how the decision affects the company's plans. Neither have responded yet.

Phoronix noted that "Canonical will now need to carry the XMir support out-of-tree from the xf86-video-intel driver." Hall wrote that Canonical "will continue to work on our projects (Ubuntu, Mir/XMir, Unity) and win by having a better product."

UPDATE: Canonical provided us with this statement on Sept. 10: "Canonical contributed XMir support that met all the technical requirements for inclusion in the upstream Intel driver, and we are disappointed that Intel decided to reverse their initial decision to include it for non-technical reasons. Fortunately, Intel customers who use Ubuntu will not see any regressions as we will simply continue to support XMir in the Intel driver as part of Ubuntu. We believe in a healthy eco-system of display servers, including X, Wayland, and Mir and plan to continue to work with upstreams such as Intel to provide the best experience to end users and OEMs."

Promoted Comments

Heck, even Canonical was going to go with Wayland initially. Then, for reasons that are still not clear, they decided to scrap that and basically recreate the Wayland project from scratch. Their rationale for doing so turned out to be full of holes (esp. their technical criticisms), but AFAIK nothing has emerged to fill those holes. People are still scratching their heads over what Mir could offer the Linux world that Wayland doesn't do better. Meanwhile, Wayland was being adopted as the next industry standard, which meant it was already guaranteed support from device and hardware manufacturers as well as all the big Linux software projects and teams. There was a broad consensus that Wayland is the way forward in a post X11 world, across multiple platforms from embedded systems to hot-rod PCs. From the standpoint of pretty much everybody that's not Canonical Mir has no compelling reason to exist and, aside from Ubuntu's mindshare with users, they don't have a reason to dedicate manpower and manhours into supporting it. And Wayland trumps Ubuntu in importance to the Linux ecosystem; the average user might know Ubuntu's name, but everything that isn't "Ubuntu" was going to be powered by Wayland under the hood, so Canonical was really swimming against the riptide on this one.